Spring 2026 Course Search

In this course, students will pursue advanced work in linguistics via topics and forms approved by their respective Plan committees.  The course will frame habitual and productive practices in the conduct and presentation of linguistic research, guide the growth of individual students' topical expertise, and present opportunities for the sharing and collaborative improvement of student work.  Through the pursuit of individual projects, students will develop and refine skills in the formulation of research questions and methods, the synthesis of existing scholarly literat

In lieu of more conventional advanced Spanish classes, paralleling a series of often disparate tutorials, with tutees working in relative isolation, the proposal is to allow students free reign over an idea for a final, term-long project, while concurrently offering them an educated, exoteric audience to assist in fleshing out their work.

This course is designed to equip students with the basic methodologies necessary to carry out linguistic fieldwork with speakers/users of un(der)documented languages. Students will be trained in the skills and tools of language documentation and description by working with a speaker of a language previously unknown to them.

Students with burgeoning linguistic skills will learn the language through an immersion in Latin American and Spanish film in the second half of this full-year introduction to the Spanish-speaking world. While there will be some discussion of more common tactics such as stylistic nuances, script-writing, acting, dubbing, and directors’ biographies, it is expected that we will continue to develop sufficient linguistic ability to focus on cinematographic and social movements, thus treating the films as ideologemes, representations of political import.

Beyond Columbus’ errant journey into the abyss and the ensuing quest for El Dorado, or Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Latin America’s interior has often enticed its own learned population. Their travels, in space, time and thought, do not merely present a physical confrontation with alterity, with the continent’s supposed heart of darkness, but an intellectual clearing, an origin, from which a more equitable politics may begin.

How are language and thought connected, and does speaking multiple languages affect these connections?  Most people have had the experience of struggling to come up with a particular word or phrase, sometimes recalling it after a substantial delay.  This course will unpack the mental processes involved in that experience and explore the ways that cognitive psychology -- the study of thought -- has been broadened by investigations of monolingual and multilingual language use.